The Voting Species by John Pearce

 
    FROM WAR TO WORDS
     
    The jungle
dwellers looked through their tears and out across the battlefield,
they were crying to drown the tragedy of their victory. Laying
before them in the usual bloody contorted positions of post-battle
were twenty thousand of their enemies; thirty thousand more had
fled from the edge of their jungle back across the plains from
whence they’d came. They had protected their jungle home yet again,
this time with an army of four thousand. Now, with two hundred
less, they lined up to lament the predicament they had been put in
by another people similar to their own. A people that would not
talk or trade, but kept trying to take their fertile jungle by the
force of greater numbers. They dared hope that their latest victory
would convince their enemies to take a more peaceful path to their
mutual salvation.
    T hey were now free to concentrate
on the new threat they’d lived well and truly under. For many of
their days now, two large objects had flown over their heads,
sometimes landing, with yet another people alighting and wandering
all over their land. One object would shoot bolts of thunder and
lightning at them from the vantage of the sky, whilst another would
fly about aimlessly and occasionally hover over them. The jungle
dwellers did not elevate these people to the level of gods, but
deduced they were from another world much like their own. They used
their knowledge to keep out of sight of these flyers; they knew
well how to run and hide, but thought it prudent to fight back only
when they had to. They wondered how long it would be before they
too could explore the stars, was there a chance that they would
ever reach out to each other, but most of all they wanted to know
why others were so different from themselves?
     
    Some of
t hese others had now found fourteen other
planets to their liking. Forty billion humans, along with the ten
billion at home made up the Galactic Federation; flexing their
democratic muscles by electing fifteen senators every five years to
the senate established on Earth. As of now, there had been no
intelligent extraterrestrial life recognized, there had been a few
humanoids scanned and dismissed as near misses. Not everybody was
disappointed by this. Gene scans allowed the transparency that
suggested to humans their past, present and future, suggested to
and not dictated to because of the mellowing affects that choice
had on their behaviour. One of evolutions more dubious mutations,
politics, thus evolved on Earth and spread out across the
Galaxy.
    It took the
best part of the twenty first century before the human race
realized that their planet could afford their genetics, but not
their behaviour, especially if they all wanted to share the same
joys as the platinum plated few. This motivator drove them out into
the heavens so that they could spread their genes throughout the
Galaxy and onto the planets they assumed were obediently waiting
for them. Evolution had already visited these luxuriant prizes and
repeated its wondrous welcome, you still do it my way! Despite
this, the Prospector was cutting its way through space back to
Earth, leaving the space-time fabric swirling in its
wake.
     
    T he invisible forces fired by
their genes had driven some into reaching out across the DNA gap as
well as the Galactic sized constituency. Twelve green clad alien
warriors and four khaki clad human scientists had now adapted to
become a team that had won the .latest round of gene and jungle
warfare.
    The humans were drawn to the uncomplicated way their
alien friends always behaved. Whether it was a matter of life and
death as demonstrated in the jungle, or the social niceties of a
shared meal, they were always direct in comments that were never
warped by human like pretensions. All eight males were roughly the
same height and build as Denton, tall and slim, but their chests
were a little larger. The females were about twenty five
centimetres shorter, the same athletic chests